Review: HANNE KROGH IN 'LYKKEN ER Å LA DET SWINGE' – She's Still Got It After Fifty Years!

Hanne Krogh is one of Norway's living legends in popular entertainment. She started at the age of 15 and has enjoyed a rich career of hits with a span of fifty years. For foreign readers she may be primarily best known as one half of the female duo Bobbysocks who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1985 with the hit "Let It Swing". But for us Norwegians she is a treasure, and whatever your opinion of her music may be you can't help but become happy when she enters the stage with that big beautiful smile of hers. That smile is contagious!

My aspirations when taking my seat last night was that I would be presented with a show where I got to know her better as a person as well as the entertainer she is. And I got what I wished for. She and writer/director/choreographer Johan Osuldsen have crafted an eighty minutes journey of her life and music, where she is candid about both herself as a person, often quite hilariously, but also about her upbringing which was not always that easy. Becoming a household name at the age of fifteen forced her to become an adult rather quickly. Her parents got divorced when she was five, and her mother took her and her siblings to Haugesund where she discovered her love for old Norwegian folk music, and the similarities it has to Celtic music are many (undoubtedly because of the huge amount of Irish people brought to Norwegian shores as slaves during the Viking period). The show has the right balance of dialogue and music, where music plays the biggest part.

She stands, mostly still, at the center of the stage (as a Diva should) and delivers each nostalgic song, sometimes in the shape of medleys, with honesty and bravura. We get to hear all the songs we wanted, and even some we didn't know we wanted. With plenty of elegant costume changes along the way, made by costume designer Cårejånni Enderud, always with the a touch of sequins. With a catalogue of hundreds of songs one can easily forgive some flubbing of lines here and there. The timbre in her voice sounds remarkably like it always has although songs have the keys lowered to fit her better, and I would much rather have it that way than the typical scenario where aging "Divas" sing in a range they shouldn't try hitting anymore. That said - I wish she would have tried a slightly bigger range than just staying in the lower octave she stayed in, except for during her version of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", with new lyrics especially written for her by Osuldsen. Here she showed that she can hit indeed hit higher notes than she may be comertable with anymore. But that is just minor grievance.

Although this is a one-woman show, it's not a one-woman cast. She shares the stage with a cast of four performers (Sofie Bjerketvedt, Lena Kokai Flage, Espen Bråten Kristoffersen and John Magnus Masaki) and a band of four (with other instruments pre-recorded for a fuller sound) under musical supervision of Hans Einar Apelland. The Four Singers/dancers all get their chance to showcase their talents during the evening, especially during the medleys. As a bonus they even get to perform her Norwegian cover versions "I Will Survive" and "What a Feeling" from Flashdance in her original costumes. Great fun!

For anyone wanting to a nostalgic trip down memory lane, singing along to familiar tunes and take in the many lovely ballads, sprinkled with interesting and funny anecdotes along the way, Hanne Krogh's "Lykken er å la det swinge" is the perfect way to celebrate her fifty years in show business.

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